Friday, July 29, 2011

learning tastes good

Baking with my kids always makes me smile. Besides the joy of making (and eating!) something together, there's the joy of playing around with fractions, measurements,doubling, and dividing. I think this always catches my attention, how interesting & useful calculations can be, because it is set against my memory of sitting at a school desk agonizing over trying to understand these same concepts removed from real life & placed instead as symbols on chalkboard & paper.

I hated math. I don't know that my kids would say they love or hate math. It isn't a "subject." It's just a tool that they use to figure out real things. If they aren't sure, they ask. If no one around is sure, we look it up. No one is going to sit back & withhold information or help in order to test them. It wouldn't be a very nice thing to do and the cookies might suck.

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"Little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning. Can we bring ourselves to let children learn and grow through that love?"